A new book from David Stone is a notable event. Stone’s
poetry is anomalous. He is “experimental” in style but cannot be classified
with any particular faction of the present avant-garde. In fact, his work is
eminently accessible in that it often resembles straightforward prose. There is
a subject, a verb, an object — the suggestion of some narrative. This is
deceiving. Like in Samuel Beckett, the narrative never really quite happens.
The false satisfaction of “closure” fails to come about. Stone’s art is realist
in technique, in its construction, like Dalí’s paintings are realist in
technique. It is the elements that Stone, like Dalí, renders, the unexpected
juxtapositions he creates in his work, that lead to cognitive strangeness.
Suddenly we notice that this is nowhere close to prose; it is always poetry
(the short, enjambed lines should have given this away in the first place!),
but poetry of a heretofore unimagined sort.

The Crystal Prism
combines aspects of myth and history in a contemporary context. The Minotaur,
Pegasus, Anubis are all here. What do they signify? Often death, or the ways that
people deal with death, or the ways in which they seek to access the other
world. But this is not some Romantic recapitulation of the old myths. These
are figures transported to twentieth- and twenty-first-century landscapes
ravaged by war and thus transformed. Time and culture are blurred. A desolate Chicago
in “Transportation” (and throughout this collection) at times bears a
resemblance to Nazi concentration camps or Soviet gulags. A pterodactyl (an
extinct species) in “Travelers” flies from Russia
to New York City tenements,
retracing the journey of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In poems like “The
Jazz Mind” and “The Crystal Band,” the personage who listens to “jazz” (which
oddly emphasizes woodwinds and xylophones and at times alludes to “the Danube”)
seems actually to inhabit a dream-like land of the dead.

This is highly political poetry. It is (among other things)
about the ways in which oppressors destroy culture and human feeling in order
to impose their own rule. In “The Prism,” there are “Ordinary citizens arrested
/ in public places” — not very much different from what is happening today, if
we observe the recent goings-on in Zuccotti Park, Taksim Park, Tahrir Square,
etc. “The Kaliningrad Depository” highlights an analogous dynamic in the
history of that city, which as a spoil of war was transformed from a center of
culture into a toxic waste-infested fortress of unlivable concrete blocks. The
poem “The Jackal” begins with the ominous lines, “In the shelled library. . .
.” Stone in The Crystal Prism (and for that matter in all of his work) reflects
the psychological position of the oppressed, but resists oppression by positing
the values of art and knowledge. For example, in “The Vision of the Dunes,”
though “capital ISMS,” a “chemical processing plant,” and a Holocaust
survivor’s tattooed number all suggest the threat of ugliness and death, “The
transposited earth / felt the fire / of Rothko’s huge, black canvas.” Now feel
the fire of poetry.